Niswat > Niswat's Quotes

“We were just privileged enough to think that we could live outside the systems and the structures and survive it, but we failed.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“We are very good at desperate emails tinged with self-destruction. Hers are more active, more interactive. We have lives that look concretely, wholly separate, lives that, if one were to track back to the causes, to the feelings and the thinking, might feel largely the same. My depression is the flattest; it’s so boring; it’s all inward—in books, at least, as well as in her emails, the characters all do things. They have too much sex; they drink; they travel and their lives at least are filled with stories that they might tell later when they’re older and they’re better, when they’re the grown-up versions of these unformed, reckless things. I envy her these stories, their shape and texture, the concreteness of her self-destruction. She is looked at, and because she’s looked at, she lives her anger and her sadness out loud and people see; I disappear and so slip down and under. I, sporadically, quite violently, try to be seen and am then further knocked down by how completely that effort fails.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“I want to tell her that I’m scared I’m too wore out, worn down, that this constant anxious ache that I have now isn’t about my job or kids or all the ways life isn’t what it should be, that maybe it’s just me, it’s most of who I am. That I loved so much believing that there was such a thing as fixing, getting better. That knowing that’s not true, that it’s all just more of the same, exhausts me more than all those nights that I can’t sleep, the miles that I run.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“My whole life, I’ll be better at this type of friendship and feel guilty for it; I like being needed, giving, but not so close that I can’t run away.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“Time passing is the only truth I believe in anymore.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“I wonder if any family, after too long trying and failing to love another, can hear one another's words beyond all the ways that they fall short.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“At least with hate you know what you are getting. Love like that, you forget sometimes it's not love, that it's empty, all words and performance, and still sometimes you grab at it, thinking maybe it will give what love's supposed to give.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“This woman sighs this big, long sigh that I think is supposed to be a sort of compliment-slash-show-of-solidarity between us. I know that if I were to sit with her by ourselves and talk a long time I’d probably like her. My quadrilingual friend is kind and brilliant and exacting and I trust she likes this woman because she is too. But I don’t have the space to sit and talk with her, to listen to and try to like her, so I sit and I allow myself to hate her, because I’m tired and it’s easy.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“I think now that if I met them on the street I would find them completely fine and bland, just people. I would find them stunted and a little sad. They wouldn’t make me angry. It’s only because they are the place where the word “love” was built for me that I feel such fury toward them, that each time I get too close, I get so mad.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“I’ve been functional for years now, but I think it is a functional that is difficult for them to make sense of. I think they thought when I got better, I’d be better than they think I am.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“We have different values is a thing I sometimes tell people when they ask about my parents, but that sounds already more subjective, more judgemental, than I mean. We are very different, very separate people, who have both accidentally and on purpose hurt and love one another poorly and intensely my whole life.”
― Lynn Steger Strong

“I don’t know the plan, I say. I wish there was one, I say. But there’s only trying to find more work. There’s only hoping that it adds up to enough. At what point, says my mother, is it time to cut your losses? At what point is it time to give up on this whole dream thing? I don’t … I start to say but don’t know what she’s asking. What dream? I ask.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“sometimes violences are small and subtle, but that only makes them harder to make sense of, to figure out how they might be forgiven, how one might make amends for them later on.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“9/11 happened my second week of college; the financial crisis came the year after we met. It would be years before we understood the implications of these chasms; we weren’t formed enough to see them, were too safe to feel their first round of hits. We made so many choices based on what we thought the world was, what it wasn’t any longer, what we’d been told it was but what we finally understand that it had never been.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“There are so many streets like this, where I have been so many different people. If anyone were to ask me why I can't leave even as this city is too hard for not-rich people, I would say it's because I'm too afraid of what would happen to all these different people somewhere else.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“That what my students do need—an obliteration of the same systems I grew up in, a burning down and re-creation of the spaces that I relied on all these years to keep me safe—I can’t do and don’t know how to.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“There is a gaping hole perhaps for all of us, where our mother does not match up with "mother" as we believe it's meant to mean and all it's meant to give us.”
― Lynn Steger Strong